A flex of ghosts
by Clouffie
Summary: The Mist shows us reflections. In its depths, it may also show us our dead. Gradual Balthier/Penelo.
1. Chapter 1

A/N Hey all, another little thing for you all. Not beta'd, due to the fact that I haven't got a beta, but please tell me if you think something's off.

Everybody knows that the images that you see in the mist are simply yourself, from a different angle. After all, what or indeed who, else could look so much like you, be wearing your garb and move only when you do?

Everybody knows this, but still many prefer to keep their eyes downcast, on the tangibility of the ground when they walk their path through the Feywood or prowl through the cloying halls of contaminate Nabudis.

Balthier knows why, or he thinks he does. A mark, magnificent in potential, startles and breaks through the carefully machinated formation that Bash, ever the mechanical man, has formulated.

Balthier sprints, full of intent to get it back, that no other may claim what is theirs ( is his, he has to correct himself in his head, annoyed).

The mark, being both larger than he and faster in a wooded place, soon pulls ahead. He follows the sound of scale on bark until even those noses fade to the basic forest static, or as close as is possible in this particular wood.

Balthier is left behind by the creature and, more to his surprise and - should he choose to admit it – growing consternation.

He thought that Fran, in the very least, would have been able to remain at his side. Then again she may have gone to cut the mark off, as it would less likely elude her.

No matter, he thinks. No matter, even as he jumps, startled, by a glimpse of white sleeves in the almost corporeal ether. Balthier mutters Akademy wisdom to himself, knows it less than wisdom now, but for comfort still he says mind over matter, mind over matter.

Balthier will admit that he is a man not meant to be alone.

He will say, freely to any, that a leading man is always in need of an audience. He will admit to cold stone on his forehead, pavement under his knees at the mouth of any ally in Ivalice – he will admit to them when his breath is dank with mhadu that he doesn't exist without one.

If he is too long alone then every ghost crawls towards him, clinging to his shiny buttons and sulk cuffs with gossamer fingers, begging him to take them to the sky.

Even an hour brings them crawling blindly, and Balthier curses himself for forgetting that they come with a whiplash vengeance, strength in the corner of their mouths and the flex of their fingers in his skin; he curses for forgetting that they are almost real in the Feywood.

The brightest and boldest ghosts are almost solid in the Mist, and these are the ones that Balthier first thinks are merely reflections of himself bounced back at him. But they dispel this notion when one of those seeming reflections turns itself to an angle whereby Balthier can see its face.

The hair is much the same as his, both in style and colour, however the eyes are much too large. Wherein life they were akin to A green canopy refracted and diluted - a jungle viewed through a drop of water, now in death they seem to be cesspits of rotting vegetation. Balthier knows nothing of these strange, Stygian, depths - but Ffamran, that sickly child who never quite released his grip on Balthier, does.

The last time he met those eyes he was but twelve years old; a bundle of barely (completely...) warranted hurt; he was to say goodbye to his second favourite brother - the first born Bunansa of this generation. Cap was to help Cid (never father, not even at this point) build a pretty weapon which was to launch still heated bronze bullets at whomsoever displeased the finger on the trigger. More like a crossbow than a gun, but gunpowder still burnt hot throughout the device.

Since Cap helped sketch the design, his delicate fingers smeared with charcoal as he mapped out each angle and curve of the thing, Cid names it after him. The Capella: Cap's full name which only their mother ever chose to use. Whether through arrogance or chance the thing is much the same hue of Bronze as Cap's hair and Ffamran, malicious at twelve, just knows the malachite handle was a touch of vanity from his brother.

It is the last time he meets Cap's eyes, as Cap leaves for another day in the workroom to help perfect the range of his pretty gun. It is the last time as the gunpowder rages too hot for the bronze frame to contain, and it explodes in a nebula of white hot metal and fractured stone shards. Cap's eyes are blistered sightless in their sockets and, so Ffamran hears from two careless maids hushed gossip a few days later, he dies for hours, screaming out of his scorched throat. Cid leaves him die in the hands of the healers, and offers no words of explanation or consolement to his other sons.

Later, Ffamran crawls into the closed off workspace and gathers close the mostly melted frame of steel and bronze, cuts his soft child's fingers on scraping up any shard of the green stone that he can see, most still tinged with his brothers blood, a small legacy that only Ffamran will ever acknowledge in that household. He meticulously puts all he could find into a small chest and tucks them away in his nest of pillows.

When Ffamran is fourteen a maid finds it, and Cid steals it away from him, not even affording him the chest with a small, old bloodstain in the corner. Ffamran knows by now - knew at twelve, at ten, longer than he cared to remember, he knows not to expect any raised voices, any concern for his state of mind or even that the remnants of gunpowder could have killed him in his sleep.

Later that month the military signs a contract for a thousand or so Capellas and Ffamran averts his eyes any time a military man might pass by him in the streets of Archades, so that he may never see his brothers colours again.

Within half a month the guns are outdated and Ffamran veers between victorious vindication and a mourning desolation at the sight of his brother's guns abandoned to the corrupt and the base; the footsoldiers and thieves in old Archades. These, his brother's legacy, Ffamran the only living preservatory to the story. Ffamran rails against Cid, blaspheming Cap's memory when he screams it at him to prove Cid's failures; this is one more prelude to leaving.

All this he thinks in twenty, thirty seconds, ineloquently as he stares at the features of his brother whose features mould themselves again into his own. He fights the desire to run after his brother, grasp his sleeve; he has been neither a brother nor a follower for years. This ghost of the Feywood stalks away as he moves himself forward; sweat stinging at the small of his back, sticking his shirt to him where even his rapid chase of the mark he once pursued had left it dry.


	2. Chapter 2

Ffamran had other brothers; all gone now and probable to loom out of the cloying Mist – Balthier, however, refuses to pander to the whims of the dead and instead follows the ground, eyes squinted so that nothing catches at the edges of his peripheral vision.

No stir in the air, none enough to provoke his interest enough to gaze beyond the foot or so of terrain in front of him. So harshly does he concentrate on the ground that when finally, finally, he is found by a large portion of his group Vaan attempts to esuna him, overeager and so wasteful, as he has ever been. As the harshness of white erases itself from his vision and Balthier's (farce of) indignant splutters and sharp-tongued recriminations have finished he notes that their party is still down by two.

Ashe and Vaan have known him not nearly long enough to notice the question that appears in his stance, the crook of his neck a little too twisted to be at ease. Fran answers the unvoiced question regardless; "We all separated. The mist is hungry for wandering."

This she intones, carefully, but she stands too solidly placed to be well – where she stalks and weaves her way through most paths, the dance of the wood strong in her blood, here she plants herself; does not trust herself with motion. Ashe and Vaan evidently were not separated from each other, but Fran's steady voice is a pace too slow, a crotchet too high and Balthier aches to address this – to say something. He will say nothing until she asks it of him as she never will.

They walk on, the unsubdued prattle of the two Dalmascans buzzing between them unquieted, for once, by Balthier's harsh remarks. A mile or more in from where they met a noise stirs them. Balthier prays that all of the fireside stories and old wives tales are true; that ghosts only latch onto you when you are alone.

They brace for impact, shields and weapons raised in equal measure.

It is no monster but Basch, no monster save for the one inside of the man, that will not touch them for favour of gnawing the man hollow. Basch moves towards them with hints of noise, unusually, through the growth and the mist – his thick shoulders tense with unease.

He, like Fran, says little – Basch mutters a sparse greeting before he seals his mouth to a thin line in his face; a parallel to the scar on his brow. When their Captain risks a glance towards the denseness of the mist, only the two pirates note the bumps at the back of his neck – tiny wheat-gold hair erect and straining away from his body, as if to pull him away from the phenomenon before him.

If Balthier had not received a visitation of his own, he might have passed comment on the lack of silence in Basch's normally undetectable movements. As it is, Balthier refrains from comment – it is not that he does not dare, for a dare is as good a starting point as anything, but he will not taunt a man with the monster of his past hollowing out his eyes. Balthier knows he has neither will nor right to breach the subject.

He can see Basch deliberately choose not to think; to follow years of militant mindset drilled into the muscles of brain and body by barking out a headcount. One Landisi, one viera, one secret Archadian and two Dalmascans noted later and Basch notices for the first time that they are short a woman.

One Dalmascan still wanders; she may have the ability to handle herself, but from the set faces of those who had paced the wood alone the sooner they could fully regroup themselves the better.

Balthier knows not what would haunt Penelo, not in so many finite details, however a slum girl from a conquered city surely would have skeletons enough in her armoire that, given time enough, could transcend the barrier of death to become corporeal in the mist and drag her down to the level of their graves with dry fingers, until soil choked her gullet fully breathless.

Balthier thinks of her buried face down in decayed leaves, like the end of a storytale his mother once warned him with as a child. His fingers itch for a trigger, a tangible target much more satisfying than choking out the spiritual nuances of himself. Balthier will not leave her to that fate; the hungry earth in this place can starve for a little longer – he will snatch its meal.

In another, clearer, terrain they would have split, but here division is danger, even in pairs or trios they won't attempt it. Fran stands, shoulders delicately rigid, as she attempts to locate anything that might lead them to Penelo.

Her ears move, in slow deliberate flicks; as she listens her ears monitor the movement of the air to a degree – tiny thermals teasing the short fur. Fran senses little, and nothing that will lead them to their wandering member. As she acknowledges this to the group Balthier, unknowing, puckers but a half of his mouth and bites an edge of his thin lip in.

They carry on, visibility much limited, with Basch and Fran in the lead; the two most able for tracking. They seek any slight indentation in the soil that could have come from a softly rounded boot.


End file.
